Passport Delay Denied: Emergency Plan In Place

Emergency plans are being put in place to ensure families who want to go on holiday get their passports back in time, the Home Secretary has said.

Theresa May said more staff would be brought in to make sure applications were dealt with in time as an increasing number of people complained about delays.

The Government has insisted there is no pile-up of applications but an extra 250 staff have been redeployed to frontline tasks in the Passport Office to tackle the 12-year high in applications that unions claim has led to a 500,000 backlog.

Mrs May said: "The Passport Office has been putting plan in place since the beginning of this year since they started to see this increase in numbers they have been increasing the number of staff and are now open - passport offices - from 7am to midnight.

"We are seeing them working longer hours, more days of the week but we will continue to look at this issue and the Passport Office will put more staff in place and resources in place to ensure that they can deal with these applications."

The increase in passport applications coincides with the closures of regional application offices across the world in an attempt to cut costs.

Those British citizens living abroad are being hit

British citizens living abroad now have to apply in the UK and many of those are now reporting significant delays with their applications.

Union bosses have claimed the Home Office has a "track record" of denying delays and said the Passport Office was in crisis because of job cuts.

Pictures taken by a disillusioned worker in the Liverpool passport office show tens of thousands of applications waiting to be dealt with.

One MP said thousands of families face having their summer holiday plans ruined because documents were not being prepared in anything like the normal time.

Applications in the Liverpool passport office

Some families who want to make sure their documents are returned in time for them to go on holiday face paying extra for a faster service - up to £55.50 on top of the £72.50 standard fee.

Mr Brokenshire admitted to Sky News that the Passport Office did make a profit from those who elected to use the faster services because they feared their holiday plans could be in jeopardy.

Three million passports have already been issued this year, with officials processing an average of 18,000 applications a day over the last two months.

Mike Jones, from the PCS Union said: "There are half a million applications that are waiting within the Passport Office at the moment.

"That figure is raised steeply over a number of months. The Home Office and the Passport Office used to have strategies in place for when the figure reached 150,000, that they would put contingency plans in to deal with those amounts."

He told Radio 4's Today programme: "Now we have seen the figures are up to 500,000 and rising at the moment. Even all the contingencies that they are trying to put in place, we are still seeing that figure rising, so there is clearly a crisis going on within the Home Office and the Passport Office as well."

Families are frantic for passports to return

Paul Pugh, chief executive of the Passport Office, said more than 97% of straightforward applications were being processed within the target turnaround time of three weeks, with 99% processed within a month.

"We've been experiencing exceptional early summer demand for passports, in part due to the improving economy and a rise in holiday bookings," he said.

Labour's Geoffrey Robinson, the MP for Coventry North West, claimed the Government had left it so late to react to what he called a "burgeoning problem" that there was not enough time to deal with it before the start of the summer getaway.

"The nub of the problem lies in the cuts the Government has made," he said.

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